The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’ve been scratching my hatless head lately trying to get a handle on why on god’s green earth everyone I know is money crazy.  A decade or so back we had that day trading stock market frenzy, folks figuring they’d just sit home in their skivvies and become millionaires by selling short, buying fast and basically outthinking the Big Boyz.  They were like card-counters in Vegas, but no pitbosses to stop them when the winning streak started. Works great when the bubble is expanding, not so good when the bubble pops.

I had a friend who day traded back when.  Stuff was going through the roof.  She was pretty sure she was going to get rich.  To me she was already rich.  She explained to me, slow as child with a plastic teether stuck in my face, it was all relative.  Meaning, she didn’t have to tell me, I was neither bright nor rich.  She needed more.  Much more than me.  And by god, she was going to get her fair share.

Over the years the tech stocks plunged, the markets have ‘corrected’, the savings and loans have debacled, the silver bubble burst after we’d melted all our dinnerware down for cash, the great recession is still with us and today, a dark day on the market, the dow dropped over 500 points.  The rich got a little poorer.  And the poor?  Well, they’re like me, too stupid, I guess, to know the difference.  Or so the big boyz think.

I will say even the folks I know without portfolio, stocks or otherwise, seem to believe, deep down in their rumbling bellies, that riches may actually lie right over the horizon.  The kids in the ghettos think the NBA will make millionaires of them, with 5 carat diamond studs in their noses, and my friends in the hood here on the South End fantasize about their lotto winnings.  People are buying gold, silver, stocks and bonds now that the real estate bubble burst.

Up in Congress they’re taking knives to the budget, to government jobs, entitlements, to anything that remotely smacks of socialism to them.  Capitalism, they preach, is the only religion.  Let them alone, keep their taxes low and they’ll make so much money there will be plenty not only to trickle down but to rain on us like manna.  We sorely want to believe them.  Even disaster after disaster.  The only thing I know, the rich are doing okay. The rest of us, maybe we ought to quit thinking we’re going to outsmart the Big Boyz.  They made all the rules, so you know, the game is rigged in their favor.  How many times you got to roll snake eyes to figure that out?  They just want you to keep playing….. Me, I’m thinking of cornering the banjo commodities.  That, or audition for American Idol.  Not real good odds, but hey, they’re looking better than the odds of finding a job.

Folks sort of pity us South Enders down here at the remote dead end of the island.  They think our shopping options are pretty near zip, almost like living in Russia at the end of the Cold War.  I admit, Tyee Store’s shelves aren’t Trader Joe’s, stocked to the roof with multiple selections and competitive pricing.  But they don’t flood us with advertising and buying gimmicks either.

We’ve all been inundated with ads all our lives.  Billboards, TV commercials, junk mail, newspapers, radio stations and now a virtual tsunami on the internet.  Hardly a dark hollow you can crawl into you won’t get some shrill ad coming at you one right after the other.  No wonder people go into debt — we’re addicted to wanting things.  We’re hooked on consuming.  New car, new clothes, new hairdo, new electronics, new every damn thing in the world.  The whole country runs on it.  No wonder Christmas is the national holiday, goes two or three months now.  If we stopped buying down at the mall and did what us South Enders do, shop at the Thrift Store, America would go broke in about a week.  Hedge fund moguls would have to buy their suits used at Goodwill.  We’d drive around less buying junk so oil companies would slow down their drilling and car companies would make bicycles.  Food would get grown in gardens, not flown in from Tinbuktu or made in a factory.  Families might turn off their gigantic TV’s because nothing would be on after all the sponsors disappeared and maybe parents would eat their meals with their kids again.

People would get to know the neighbors instead of surfing the Web for good deals on replacing appliances that work perfectly okay now.  They might even repair stuff that broke instead of tossing it down at the dump.  Maybe we’d learn to read again instead of updating our Facebook page, maybe our attention spans would expand and flowers would grow lush in our yards and weather would improve and we’d be happier and paradise would spread across the land and we’d all laugh and play on our very own South Ends.

Right…..   Then again, we only got so much South End room left.  Sorry.  I’m afraid you addicts will just have to make do.  Go to the Mall and see what they got on sale.  Hey, and good luck to ya.  You wouldn’t like it down here anyway.  Bad selections for consumers.  It’s true, though, you can’t buy happiness.  If you don’t believe me, google/shop that.  Poor selection, no sale price…..

Historic preservation on the South End is slightly different than other places.  Most areas restore an architecturally significant  building  — the way folks did in Stanwoodopolis with the Odd Fellows Hall  — or you fix up a fancy theater or tidy up the old Pearson House, maybe rehab a train station.  Tie a little history to art, throw in a chamber orchestra, occasional theater group, poetry reading — get some volunteers, apply for a grant, hey, we’re halfway there to creating cultural identity.

Down by us we’re toying with a campaign to save the Tyee.  The Tyee Store, I mean, an iconic example of 70’s minimalist architecture done in masonry block painted a classic mildewed white with a low sloping shed roof blown off once or twice, and a fully functional outhouse.  The store owners weren’t real happy with our ad hoc group to save the Tyee, but considering they’re losing money hand over fist, we plowed ahead.  Jack Gunter had already restored the adjoining garage to its present pristine glory, proving that expensive restoration isn’t always necessary for the South End Historical Preservation League.

But it was the EPA that finally derailed our high hopes of creating the Tyee Opera House and Expresso Stand.  It turns out those rotating rotisserie deli dogs with their infra-red warming oven carbon tracking for decades, well, apparently it created a super strain of E-coli no known agents can destroy.  It was like a culinary meth lab and if they can create bio-suits secure enough to withstand the new strain of unearthly bacteria,  they might have a 50/50 chance of burying the place in glass and concrete like a South End Chernobyl.  That, or the Defense Dep’t. is interested in expanding it as a toxic agent lab…..

We South Enders are in no danger, we’re told, somehow building antibodies to the superbugs, but we sure couldn’t expose outsiders to the pestilence.  So… for the time being our cultural aspirations are on hold.  But don’t you all worry.  We won’t be stopped.  After all,  the Elger Bay Store has that early ‘80’s shotgun stripmall architecture that will be stylish in, oh, a decade or so….

I saw a segment on CNN the other night for a poll that showed American’s approval of … God.  He got a spare 52% job approval score.  Probably up a few points since the flood during Noah’s time.  The President got a bit less.  They didn’t give ratings for the Devil, or Hitler, but let’s assume they would be lower, hopefully substantially lower.

Somehow it’s troubling that the Lord God Almighty gets rated at all, much less gets tepid scores in the most religious industrialized nation on earth.  He is, after all, the All Knowing, the Creator, the Whole Enchilada.  And we puny humans give him barely a thumbs up.

Some talking heads came on later to analyze the data. Tsunamis and starvations probably didn’t help the Lord’s ratings, they said.  Bad recession either.  If He can create the cosmos, why not some jobs?  Raise up those poll numbers, if nothing else.

Maybe God doesn’t worry about his approval ratings.  Hard to believe, I know.  Most of us seem busy fixing up our Facebook accounts so we’ll look interesting and exciting and sexy to all those network ‘friends’ we barely know but follow their every movie or book or grocery store escapade.  Mostly I think we must be supremely bored or insecure to care what people we barely know do or think about us.  Maybe we ought to get on with our lives and skip the vote for prom king or queen, move right on to adulthood, build a life worth living without giving a hoot in hell what the Facebook friends are buying or reading or recommending.

Course, here I am giving out probably unwanted advice.  Just what you want to hear, right?  Next I’ll be telling you what I read and my favorite recipes and where I went this morning.  Like you should care?

Oh, and God, if you’re listening with that omniscience of yours, could you maybe put the brakes on this 3-D movie craze?  I’m not saying it’ll ratchet up your approval ratings, but, hey, it couldn’t hurt.  You might even consider Facebook.  Think of it as a cheap computer church.  Just don’t take it personal when we don’t ‘friend’ you.  Kinda busy here….

Down at the South End we got some pretty porous borders.  Immigration’s starting to put a burden on our social services network and I got to tell you, it’s tearing a hole in our delicate social fabric too.  We got right-wing conservatives yelling to build a Seawall around the whole island 20 feet high and guarded by killer dolphins.  And we got left wing hippie yahoos screaming bloody murder to give the whole crowd amnesty.

It’s a tough issue for us in the land that says bring us your tired, your teeming masses.  I don’t think they meant just Ellis Island when they put up the Statue of Liberty.  Probably Camano too.  But this latest influx, well, we’re all alarmed.  We’re concerned.  Most of us are up in arms.

Every week they roll across the borders, bringing strange customs and odd dialects.  We tried, at first, to welcome em in, boil em down in the melting pot, make em one of us South Enders.     But they kept to their own.  Set up communities within our community.  Made it clear they wanted to be left alone, not assimilated.  A lot of em locked the gates — it’s America, after all, you can be unfriendly if you want.  But then came the Gated Communities, the guard stations, the checkpoints.

And pretty soon all our jobs were going to servicing THEM.  We became gardeners and housekeepers, handymen and servile artists.  We got all the low paying service jobs for these rich newcomers, these dot.com millionaires, these Boeing exec retirees.  Our pride and our way of life dried right up.

I’m not saying we ought to stop this immigration completely, but I think we’re reaching a dangerous tipping point.  Maybe some quotas would help  — you know, no more than one millionaire a square mile.  Keep the property values in reach of our kids and make it possible to live out our lives here without becoming indentured servants.  Write your congressman.  Put a stop to unchecked immigration.

     I know you folks have probably heard the news:  Stanwood wants to bring a 4 year college to the area.  Univ. of Stanwoodopolis.  Higher degrees in Lefse Rolling, Lutefisk Engineering, and Storage Unit Management.

     Now, I know what you’re thinking.  The town’ll be over-run by eggheads.  Professors taking over the barstools at the Stanwood Hotel, ruining our rural backwash hick ambiance.  Expecting political discussions, not fishing stories.  Wanting napkins with their hand-crafted malt beverages and hors douerve plates, not peanuts.  The Snow Goose bookstore will sell 5 pound tomes with 5 dollar words nobody but the PhD’s will understand.  FOR 50 DOLLARS!  With titles like the Socio-Economic Dialectic of the 3^rd generation Scandihoovian in the Stillaguamish River Drainage.

     The whole town’ll go to hell in a hurry.  Just when the fast food franchises were giving us a glimmer of hope of joining mainstream society.  All those student shops will take over now.  More art galleries.  Boutique soap stores.  Boutique clothing stores.  Boutique furniture stores.  Head shops.  Movie houses, Art movie houses.  Fancy pants restaurants.  Ethiopian Epicure.  Persian Pizza.  La De Da Linguini.

     Gonna look like Berkeley in the 60’s.  Long hair.  Free love.  Dope smoking, anti-war, bohemian anti-establishment types.  Weird clothes.  Weird music.  Weird period.  Weird as a Way of Life.

     Which….. if you stop and think about it, is a perfect description of the South End.  Which … if you been following our logic here, is exactly why the new campus should be located down by us —  the University of the South End, Tyee Branch.  Save em from hiring new professors.  The woods are thick with em.  The Band alone could be a quarter of the art faculty.  Think about it.  It’s the obvious location — and it’ll preserve the Stanwoodopolis we all love……

Oh, I know you all think the next location of the new college campus extension is pretty much a done deal.  Stanwoodopolis University, advanced degrees in lefse rolling, lutefisk production and storage unit management  —- sure, it looks like a lock.

     But before you start building those ivory towers out on the edge of the sewage lagoon, hold on one South End minute, cause we haven’t thrown in our towel yet.  And don’t start yammerin how we don’t have the infrastructure to support all that brain matter.  We got two – count em, 2 – mom and pop grocery complexes.  Plenty of beer and pizzas for future PhD’s.  And Daddle Distilleries can gear up for heavy production in a moment’s notice to supply fraternity and sorority alike PLUS the faculty needs.

     Sure, dismiss us if you like but dismiss us at your peril.  You’re thinking, why on god’s green earth would anybody stick a major university down in a nettle hellhole like the South End.  The only education they got is the School of Hard Knocks and they’re so hard headed now, no degrees are getting handed out.

     But you forget … we got the Elger Bay Institoot of Esthetic Enlargement, a liberal arts school that rivals Evergreen State for creative degrees.  We got graduates down here so creative they don’t need to work anymore to earn a living once they enter the art colonies of the South End.  Oh, I’m not saying they got rich.  I’m not saying they’re famous.  But how many Ivy Leaguers can claim 90% of their graduates instantly retired??? 

    That’s right  … we been preparing students since 1977 for the rigors of early retirement — WITHOUT working for Microsoft.  So don’t count us out.  We got our P.R. machine cranking 24/7, full color promotional brochures, all the megatonnage our art department is capable of when fully sober…

     University of the South End:  25 miles from I-5, but only 4 years from Retirement.  Catchy, ain’t it, Stanwood?  Good luck to ya,  you’ll need it.

What with all this global warming this year, the South End’s been inundated with snowstorms, monsoons, windstorms and bad craziness – all of it culminating in power outages that last for days.  The neighbors who didn’t snowbird it to Phoenix or Baja are about half deranged breathing generator fumes and cursing the PUD, the government, God and the day they retired to a backwash like South Camano. 

     I try to reassure em, being the Good Samaritan I am.  I tell em about the good old days where we lost the Grid for even longer, even more often.  I tell em how the missuz came to my love shack in ’81 in a raging storm.  Power out, trees down, tide lashing the beach, practically had to cut our way home to a dark shack she’d, fortunately, never set eyes on. 

     I tell em, think romantic.  Think oil lamps and candlelight, quiet conversation, flickering shadowplay and the haunting strains of a banjo gently weeping.  Think, this is how it once was.  The wind strumming the fir boughs and the world vibrant and pulsing in a way TV pretty much dulled.  Think of that old lovelight rekindled and warming like a cookstove, the dreams rising once again, yeasty and full of glutinous potential. 

     That’s how this old codger thinks of the South End.  And if I have to be reminded of it every storm, every power outage, every candled memory, well, it’s a welcome few days.  And Ma and Me, we think of em sort of as anniversaries.  Course, after 3 or 4 days, we’re ready for TV.  Or divorce.  Or maybe just a generator of our own.

     I know a lot of you are worried about Global Warming.  And I know some of you don’t believe it’s true.  I know some folks are worried about the next Ice Age.  And others think we’re still in it.

     We got El Nina years and La Nina years.  We got ozone depletion, greenhouse gas accretion, we got soft tundra and oozing glaciers, we got more hurricanes and record setting cold weather.  We got record setting hot weather and jet streams hopping north and south so fast it’s like a bi-polar meteorological condition.

     It’s getting hard to know how to dress.  Layers, I guess.  Gortex layers.  It’s that or Biospheric Domes.  Put the cities under Pyrex.  Big thermostat the City Council can fight over.  Yell at each other for forgetting to turn it down at night.

     Personally I think all this weather talk is good.  You can’t talk politics anymore everybody’s so polarized.  I just worry when we blame the other party for the weather.  What’re we gonna talk about then?  Republican caused monsoons?  Hurricane Cantor?  The Obama Blizzard of 2010?  The Democratic Killer Heat Wave? 

     I don’t know about all of you, but I think that will have some serious global consequences.  Shrinking dialogues, frozen conversations, stormy relationships and violent domestic ventings.  Fox Weather might predict calm sunny days every day of the week, but for the rest of us, it means no more conversational crutches.  No more, ‘Hot enuff for ya?’ instead of ‘How about that War in Libya?’  No more ‘I’m ready for it to quit raining any decade now’ instead of ‘You got an opinion on that Murdoch hacker scandal in the British tabloids?’

      So if you’re complacent about the global warming debate, imagine a Weather Channel that looks like Chechnya.  Maybe you’ll rethink it.

     I used to raise peacocks.  You ever seen peacocks strutting thru a South End shack yard, it’s sorta otherworldly.  They brought an elegance that’s indescribable to my backwash palace.  You ever HEARD one of these exotic creatures, you might reconsider classing up the bottom land.  They got a scream like a child being tortured.  I guarantee the neighbors will wear out 911 with their calls of mayhem and madness at your place.      Course when I had the peacocks, we didn’t have neighbors.  No, they didn’t move away because of the noise, they just hadn’t Discovered the fabulous South End yet.

      My peacocks, no offense to you Bird Huggers out there – my peacocks had a head about the size of a big martini olive.  And inside that head they had a brain the size of, well, a pea.  My peacocks were not bright.  They made a chicken look like Albert Einstein.  They thought my Banty hen, who’d hatched their eggs, they thought she was not only Einstein, but their mama and God too.      Don’t ask me what I was thinking.  My brain isn’t real big either.  Although I’m pretty sure who my mama is but don’t ask me about Pop.  I’m like the peacocks – I just go on faith.

     I had the peacocks a few years until Mama Banty got picked off by a Wily Coyote.  They wouldn’t come back to the henhouse after that, so they roosted in the cedars every night.  Dumb or not, they figured out the climbing ability of a coyote.  Finally they decided to go looking for Ma.  The Police Blotter in the Stanwood Gazette – and this is the Gospel Truth – would report on their progress north.  Peacock sighting at Dahlman Road.  Peacocks seen gathering at Sunnyshore.  Eventually they found a chicken surrogate ma up by O-Zi-Ya.  O-Zi-Ya is Southendomish, meaning, I think, Ornithological Orphanage. 

Sometimes I miss those little pea-brains.  Although I can sleep longer w/o an alarm clock that sounds like a nightmare.  I wonder, though, if I’d kept em, if the South End mighta stayed, oh, I don’t know, less developed.  Maybe forced the new neighbors to move north instead.